As of today — November 5, 2020 — the Arizona Appellate Blog has been in operation for twelve years.

And that’s long enough.

Even if we weren’t old and decrepit there are too few truly interesting civil opinions left to blog. We’ve written barely one blog per month this year and not greatly more than that the last couple of years; early on we were annually in the 60s, later in the 40s. Nowadays even Division One is largely a machine for reviewing criminal cases. This trend, not unique to Arizona, is the new normal. It is a significant development, though one not much mentioned at a time when criminal law is assumed to be at the heart of our jurisprudence and of our profession. (That was historically neither the truth nor the assumption among lawyers in general, even relatively recently.)

We will keep the web site up; there are over 500 case blogs here that can be of continued use. But there will be no more new ones. (When you see ads appear on the site that doesn’t mean we’re making money; it means we stopped paying our web hosting service the surcharge that keeps them off.)

We’ve enjoyed doing this and we hope that we’ve helped, or at least entertained, people along the way. Although we’ve never allowed public comments (moderating flame wars would have driven us away long ago), informal feedback from lawyers and judges has been encouraging (except for a few folks who don’t understand the uses of illeism).

Thank you all.